5 Steps With Joris Voorn

There are some DJ/producers who get caught up their own little genre-specific worlds, remaining closed off to anything that doesn’t fit in with ‘their sound’. Then there are those like Joris Voorn. A firm favourite here in the DT officer, the Dutchman never fails to impress with his house/techno straddling sets and productions. Diligently working away for over a decade, Voorn may not always be the biggest name on the bill, but you can be damn sure he’ll still be the best. With this in mind, we’ve been wondering what the secret to Voorn’s success is – what were the key steps on his road to greatness? Well, nobody can answer that question than the man himself, so without further ado, take it away Joris…

‘95/’96

I was a guitar playing indie kid, listening to my favourite bands like The Pixies, Smashing Pumpkins, Tool, Nine Inch Nails, Teenage Fanclub, you name it.. I hated house music, heard it on the radio all day long, godawful stuff like 2 Unlimited, Scooter, Snap.

So what happened?

I lived close to the Belgian border and listened to Studio Brussels as much as the Dutch VPRO radio stations at night. They were a huge influence for me, it’s where I heard all new music, mostly indie stuff. Around maybe 1994 they started playing more electronic music, starting with instrumental hip hop and trip hop, then bands like Chemical Brothers, Underworld, Leftfield and such.

But there were other sources of new music. My high school friend Lucas van de Velden , who now runs the Dutch avant-garde electronic music and arts festival, Sonic Acts, started listening to electronic music and passed me cassettes of music by guys called Sasha, Eat Static and Orbital. Then there was the brother of my first girlfriend who was heavily into any kind of alternative music and had a newspaper job so he could afford all the new CDs he wished. He taped all the good stuff for me, Biosphere, Future Sound of London, even early jungle compilations.

Of course I was buying my own music, but my newspaper job was much smaller as I lived in the countryside. So I was mainly looking at half price and second-hand CDs, but found some really amazing music like the Networks.1 – An Intellinet Compilation, Steve Stoll’s Pacemaker album, the Trance Atlantic 2 compilation, Autechre’s Incunabula, an Eye Q – Behind The Eye Vol.II trance compilation, Model 500’s Deep Space and the highly extensive R&S In Order To Dance 5 compilation. These albums were all intriguing and defining. It was also around this time that Dave Clarke’s Archive One was released, and that was just of another world. It probably had more of an influence on me musically than anything else around that time. It all happened just before I went to college to study art and design.

Enschede (NL)

The city I studied in was small. I had a tiny little mixer and a bunch of CDs and I started mixing tapes for my new college friends and someone suggested giving it to someone who worked at the local pop venue. It happened that they were just organising a DJ competition, looking for fresh DJ blood for their thursday student dance night. There were only a few attendees, and I was one of them, competing with 3 ‘real’ DJ’s who actually played vinyl.

A guy called Edwin Oosterwal won because he simply was an amazing DJ with a great track selection. They also let me win because I played trip hop, chemical beats, dub house, jungle, goa trance, techno and acid and they liked it. Edwin and I became friends instantly and he showed me the rest of the world of house and techno. I was hooked and started buying records.

After reading a book about electronic music mentioning a 303, I went to the shop to buy one. It turned out to be out of production for at least 10 years, but they did have the MC-303 Groove Box. I took out a killer loan and spent most my time making music with this all-in-one electronic music production machine and taped a shoebox full of cassettes.

At the end of 4 years in college I got my first Apple G4 computer and started sampling loads and loads of music, something I was never able to do. One small loop was that of Santana, loads of percussion and a little organ riff. Another was the piano intro of The Reese Project – ‘The Colour Of Love’ (Underground Resistance Mix). 3 years later I was in Rotterdam looking thru my old samples and found those two, together they became the track that launched my career, ‘Incident’.

Rotterdam (NL)

After my studies I moved to Rotterdam for my masters in architecture. I did that for a while but was always making music at night, and after an short internship at OMA I realised architecture was maybe not my first love. Music was.

I met so many people in Rotterdam, there were great parties, great record stores, it was booming in the early 2000’s. I became friends with a guy called Joachim who was running a business called Sound Architecture. He was also running saturdays at Off Corso, booking all the good techno names those days. This is where I met Derrick May and Technasia, whom I both sent music to. The release on Transmat was close, but it never happened. Technasia signed my first album called Future History on Sino Records. Future History opened doors for me, and my fresh new booking agent Phuong Truong made me travel around the globe. I went to Asia, where I met my wife Shanthi, I went to the US, Brazil, and did the biggest festivals in Europe. A pivotal moment was playing in-between the Chemical Brothers and Jeff Mills at the MainStage at Sonar, and later that year at Wire Festival in Japan.

2009

I was doing ok generally, survived the minimal techno period, and I remember talking to a friend of mine in 2008 about how to take a next step, I really didn’t know. Then 2009 came and it changed everything. My Balance 14 mix CD was released. It had taken me months of work, and I was exhausted and wanted to do something nice and easy. This resulted in the ‘Dusty House’ series on Rejected Records. It was so much fun just creating house tracks without thinking too much. Both the mix CD and the EP’s gave me the push I was looking for, it wasn’t fabricated though, there was no master plan. It was a fun new musical direction, but when it became mainstream it was time to move on.

Trouw (Amsterdam)

In their first year the now notorious Trouw was having a tough time. They were new on the scene in Amsterdam and still had to win their loyal fanbase. It’s in this time that me and my partner Edwin Oosterwal started talking to Trouw about doing a label night at the club. We really loved it from day one, and soon sold out the nights. Trouw was becoming an important player in the Amsterdam music scene, and we had found a place where we could just play anything we wanted, all night long.

I played one of my first ‘all night long’ sets at the club, and didn’t really look back since then. Trouw had become the one place on earth where I could really express my true self as a DJ, and it was only a 5-minute bike ride from home. There have been other clubs and all night sets since, but there’s now place like Trouw, being right there with the audience an arms length away on any side.

Catch Joris Voorn playing B2B with Kölsch and Steve Rachmad at sidexside at Tobacco Dock, London this Saturday 2nd April, alongside Carl Cox, andhim, Jon Rundell, Seth Troxler, Loco Dice, Craig Richards and more.